I have to say it’s helpful when you’re working for a small historical society museum to have a spouse who’s a technology guy. My husband Holly just found a QR code generator called delivr. A QR code (QR stands for Quick Response) is that bar code-like mosaic that you see cropping up on signs and labels. You point your smart device (phone or tablet) at the QR code, and it immediately takes you to a Web location (be it a website, audio or video file, image, etc…) I haven’t paid them much mind because I don’t have a smart device, but I don’t want our museum to miss an opportunity with all those people who are using mainstream technology.OK, back to my story. I just went to delivr, pasted in our website address, hit ENTER, and generated the code. (Will that really take people to our site?) We took my husband’s smart device, pointed it at the code at right, and straight away it opened up the Hatfield Historical Society home page. It only took a few moments, no joke. And no typing! Check it out.

Now, in addition to putting our web address on our program flyer and event posters, we can add this QR code to make it faster and easier for people to find us. But say I want to use a QR code in the museum to send folks to an audio clip that goes with an artifact – like 102-year-old Mary Riley Pickett talking about the old hand-cranked phone (below) and the “party line” phone system in Hatfield.

I went to our free audio hosting site SoundCloud (see prior blog post), copied the URL for the audio clip, pasted it into delivr and presto -- here it is.Try it!

We’re also curious to know if e-readers like Kindles and Nooks can read the codes. Let us know how or where you’ve used QR codes, and what you like or don’t like about how they’re used.

* By the way, if you happen to be upgrading your tablet and have an earlier model you’d consider donating to our “cozy” museum (that’s old-fashioned code for not enough room and tight exhibit spaces), we’d love to let our visitors who don’t have smart devices yet (most of them) still be able to access additional stories about artifacts – without taking up more room. (You never know unless you ask...)

We have about a dozen digital oral histories with great stories from local seniors talking about growing up in our Connecticut River farming town in the 1930s and ’40s. You can listen to the full interviews in the museum or borrow the CDs from our library or inter-library system. But what if you don’t live in the area? Or you just want a taste?

I’d been wanting to add audio clips to our website from our series of “Hatfield Stories” interviews for a long time, but didn’t know how to do it. And I was pretty sure we had to upgrade to a paid premium account (on Weebly.com, our free website hosting service) to allow audio files to play. Thanks to my husband, who is always trolling for free applications, I found SoundCloud, an audio hosting site. It’s like YouTube for audio-only.

After signing up for an account (did I mention it was free?), I uploaded my mp3 audio clips and an image (optional), wrote a few lines of intro text, and now we’ve got streaming audio for free. Check it out by clicking HERE.

The wonders of the Internet. Don’t believe those people who say technology is getting in the way of people connecting with people. You can let it do that, or you can use it to bring people together who would never have the chance to meet. You’ll meet some great Hatfield folks by listening to the clips in the link above. Enjoy!

It was not until finishing Craig Childs’ Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession* (2010, Little Brown) for the second time (the first time was just for fun), that I could finally put into words why I feel such an attachment to some artifacts in our museum. It is because they have a story.

Childs does a fascinating and thought-provoking job of explaining the immensely complicated world of collecting cultural stuff, mostly buried artifacts, whether held in private collections or public museums. He finds no easy answers, but whether you collect an Anasazi pot from the American Southwest or, in our case, a hand-made wooden shuttle given as a present from a man to a woman (perhaps a father to a daughter?), the value of a piece is greatly enhanced by knowing and sharing where it came from – its provenance.

My maternal grandmother Josepha Bushey was the Queen of Provenance. What I’ve found so interesting about going through her memorabilia (she died in Newton, KS, in 1980), is that she left stories with almost every item she saved. Her methods were low-tech (most often a hand-written note pinned to a piece of fabric), but they give us not only a window into her past, but a window into life at an earlier time.

Take this little square of black netting. Alone, it is just a worthless scrap of fabric that might as easily go to Goodwill as to the trash. Instead, I learn from my grandmother’s note that she attended Marymount College in Salinas, Kansas, in the 1920s – and that she had to wear this veil to chapel every day, accompanying her uniform of navy wool serge with a stiff white collar and cuffs. But, she notes, they could wear a dress of their choice on Sundays (after church, that is). That’s a lot of information out of so small and seemingly insignificant an artifact. And she wrote many such notes.

In our museum, we of course have artifacts that bear similar tags – such as “Mary Wait Allis’ neckchief, worn to church when church was in the middle of the road, about 1840.” But for every object that bears that much of a note, we have 10 with nothing more than an item name, collection number and donor.

In most cases we can’t produce an orphan artifact’s provenance now – it is too late. But my grandmother’s anecdotes have made me realize two things: one, that I should start writing notes for my own (and my children’s) keepsakes, and two, that I should try to get stories and context with every new artifact that comes to our museum.

As Child’s says in his book Finders Keepers, “We may be making more archaeology all the time, but once the original context is lost, that story is over.”

*This post will be the first of several that reference Craig Childs’ Finders Keepers, as he raised so many thought-provoking issues relevant to the plight and challenges our local historical museum faces today.

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Curator's musings...

As the curator of a small town Historical Society museum, I wonder a great many things. Am I alone in these thoughts that come to me while driving, or exercising, or falling asleep at night? Is it unusual to be constructing displays and writing copy in one's head for an enlarged museum space that does not, as yet, exist?

If you're wondering about the blog title, "Bird by bird," see my First Post for an explanation! Click HERE to read it.

When I'm not thinking about our museum or rehousing artifacts with my fellow museum committee members, I'm helping out with the Pioneer Valley History Network (of which I'm a board member), collecting or editing digital oral histories (see words.pictures.stories)or keeping track of my two teenage kids.